Review: Ana Mendieta – Blood, Feathers and Voodoo

In its last week at the Hayward Gallery, the show explores the life and art of this brilliant, magnetic artist

On December 26, 1960, a dozen children and their parents arrived at Havana’s José Martí International Airport. The children boarded the plane. Over the next couple of months 500 children followed. By 1962, over 14,000 Cuban children had landed in Miami.

Codenamed Operation Peter Pan by the CIA – Pedro Pan by the Catholic organizations on the Cuban side – it was an attempt either to protect the children of people who opposed the new regime or to destabilise the government. Depends to whom you speak.

Ana Mendieta was only 12. She grew up with her elder sister in a foster home in Iowa. It took 18 years to be reunited with her father who had been imprisoned for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion. By that time she was starting to establish herself as an artist. Six years later, aged 36, she was dead.

The show at the Hayward Gallery is the first major retrospective of her work in the UK. It is an intensely personal show. It begins with her MFA work conducted under the guidance of her professor and lover, Hans Breder; featuring a re-hanging of her two main exhibitions held during her lifetime. This includes her 1978 show at the all­female A.I.R gallery, and ends with her wooden sculptures – a beginning of a “totemic grove”, carved during her year abroad as winner of the Prix de Rome.

The brevity of her career, its cohesion, and her magnetism as an artist go some way to explaining the show’s success. The role of her work in the feminist movement, and in the development of Latin American art and performance art are also important factors.

It is difficult to banish the thought of her death when looking at her work – her siluetas often bring to mind crime scenes or open graves. The exhibition delicately sidesteps her notoriety – her husband, the artist Carle André, who was acquitted of her murder, is mentioned only once in the catalogue.

However, it is really the story of her early exile from Cuba that is helpful in interpreting her oeuvre. And indeed, she described her departure from Cuba as being “cast from the womb”. The majority of the exhibition concentrates on her famous works: the haunting siluetas, reiterative outlines of her body carved into the earth, marked with leaves and vines or traced by flickering melting black candles. She uses the imagery of Santería, the fusion of voodoo cult and Catholicism, and the mystery of a distant land barely remembered. It is as if she is trying to reconnect with mother earth, melding with her, leaving only the trace of her outline in an attempt to find a resting place.

Mendieta was used to being an outsider. When she arrived at the newly established intermedia program at the University of Iowa, she was the only woman on the course. While she worked on sculpture and performance art using blood, hair, feathers and documenting it with photography and film, her classmates – all men – were more interested in conceptual art and by the clean lines of minimalism.

In 1973, she invited some of her colleagues to her room. When they arrived, she had exactly recreated, using her body covered with ox­blood as a prop, the scene of the rape and murder of a young nurse that had happened on campus months before. A series of murky photos are displayed on the white walls of the Hayward.

In another photograph she awkwardly crouches naked, covered only with blood, for tar, and feathers, a strange chicken­like figure. It prefigures the video shot in grainy super­eight where she stands, holding a chicken, its throat cut spraying blood, in a ceremony reminiscent of village magic.

There is a sense that Mendieta was most inspired working within constraints. She eventually visited Cuba in 1980, where, more established and able to afford a better camera, she could print large­scale black and white photos of the symbols of Taíno goddesses she had chipped away in caves. In Rome, having a studio allowed her to carve large­scale totemic sculptures in bark. These seem far less visceral and urgent than her earlier stuff. The polish of the later photographs and the graphic drawings on bark paper and sculptures meant to evoke archetypal earth symbols are less arresting. More generic, they look like you could buy them in a Cuban market on your holiday.

Damning, perhaps, and unfair; she was never able to build on the new direction her work had taken. But as you look at the hypnotic archive of all of the photos that she could never afford to print and documentary evidence that she collected while working, you can tell there is a search for that perfect place, that perfect moment and you wish you could wander though the totemic grove she was in the midst of shaping.

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Jose Amaro

Despite the fact that it fails to provide an account of Ana’s untimely and tragic death (a death that her closest friends and associates believe to be a homicide), it is a very illuminating article. On the other hand, it is mistaken in attributing the name Operation Peter Pan to the CIA. It is widely acknowledged that the name Operation Peter Pan was coined by Miami Herald Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Miller in an article appearing in the March 10, 1962 Evansville Press (Indiana) newspaper. Operation founder and director the late Msgr. Walsh wrote however that the person to first use the term informally behind the scenes, since the Miami media was sworn to secrecy, was WTVJ’s newscaster Ralph Resnick. Rather, the official code name given by the United States government to the operation was “Operation Exodus.” Once Msgr. Walsh and the Kennedy Administration decided to remove the veil of secrecy that surrounded the operation in 1962, the name was widely used in interviews with the media by administration officials, particularly Kennedy Administration’s Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham H. Ribicoff, who at the request of the president initiated the US Program for Unaccompanied Cuban Refugee Children in 1960. Lastly, the final word on the motivation of the operation belongs not to its detractors or defenders but rather to the counter-revolutionary and anti-communist parents of the Pedro Pan children, who -according to most of them- sought to prevent the Marxist-Leninist indoctrination of their sons and daughters, and the children themselves, most of whom are grateful to their parents, the Catholic Church and the US government for having rescued them from the fate that befell those who were unable to leave. A little known fact is that once Operation Pedro Pan came to an end in October 1962, some 5,000 Cuban children went to Madrid between 1965 and 1970 in an agreement reached by Dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Prime Minister Fidel Castro and the Catholic Church of Spain. Faced with this contradiction, detractors of the operation, particularly the propaganda arm of the Castro government, have unsuccessfully attempted to link this operation to the CIA as well. Bear in mind that although all social classes, races and religions were present, most Pedro Pan children were members of the professional middle and attended private catholic schools. This explains why the Catholic Church, both in Cuba and abroad, played such an important role in the operation. Ana Mendieta came from a wealthy family with close ties to the government and history of Cuba. Thanks for the illuminating article on the art of Ana Mendieta.

agent.provocateur

WOW…why is this on the Catholic site? This so called “artist” was publicly displaying her naked body (surely not an ideal of chastity) and was sympathetic to feminism – ideology which is not complementary with the Holy Catholic Faith.

Marie Dean

If you have ever had experience with real Voodoo, you would have never put this on your site. I think you should reconsider this article. Voodoo has kept an entire area crossing boundaries of four states in America for 100 years which is Catholic from not having one vocation, and the Irish Missionaries and Latino priests had to serve the thousands of Catholics there. Also, this is a religion of revenge and hatred, based on curses. I suggest you speak with a Catholic exorcist priest about Voodoo.

These artistic items are not spiritually neutral.

That the woman’s life was tragic should be a cause for our prayers. Just because someone suffers injustice does not mean we lionize that person.

George

I think the Catechism might be against voodoo because paragraph 2117 says “All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others – even if this were for the sake of restoring their health – are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another’s credulity.”

anon

magnetism, the dark arts and violence; as a post script it is worth mentioning http://www.cedar.uk.net,providing Catholic assistance for victims of violence in families
(certainly Feminists of the1970s created a framework for this type of provision)